Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Horst H. von Brand
2006-07-24T18:09:58Z

Mike Benoit <ipso@snappymail.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 12:25 +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> > On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Hans Reiser wrote:
> >
> > > >and that's the end
> > > >of the story for me. There's nothing wrong about focusing on newer code,
> > > >but the old code needs to be cared for, too, to fix remaining issues
> > > >such as the "can only have N files with the same hash value".
> > >
> > > Requires a disk format change, in a filesystem without plugins, to fix it.
> > You see, I don't care a iota about "plugins" or other implementation details.
> >
> > The bottom line is reiserfs 3.6 imposes practial limits that ext3fs
> > doesn't impose and that's reason enough for an administrator not to
> > install reiserfs 3.6. Sorry.

> And EXT3 imposes practical limits that ReiserFS doesn't as well. The big
> one being a fixed number of inodes that can't be adjusted on the fly,

Right. Plan ahead.

> which was reason enough for me to not use EXT3 and use ReiserFS
> instead.

I don't see this following in any way.

> Do you consider the EXT3 developers to have "abandoned" it because they
> haven't fixed this issue? I don't, I just think of it as using the right
> tool for the job.

Dangerous parallel, that one...

> I've been bitten by running out of inodes on several occasions,

Me too. It was rather painful each time, but fixable (and in hindsight,
dumb user (setup) error).

> and by
> switching to ReiserFS it saved one company I worked for over $250,000
> because they didn't need to buy a totally new piece of software.

How can a filesystem (which by basic requirements and design is almost
transparent to applications) make such a difference?!

> I haven't been able to use EXT3 on a backup server for the last ~5 years
> due to inode limitations.

See comment above. Read mke2fs(8) with care.

> Instead, ReiserFS has been filling that spot
> like a champ.

Nice for you.

> The bottom line is that every file system imposes some sort of limits
> that bite someone.

Mostly that infinite disks are hard to come by ;-)

> In your case it sounds like EXT3 limits weren't an
> issue for you, in my case they were.

I'd suspect the limits you ran into weren't exactly in ext3.

> Thats life.
--
Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org
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